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2 yr. ago

  • In case anybody skips the article, it's a six year old cybernetically force grown to the body of a horny 13 to 14 year old.

    The rare sentence that makes me want to take a shower for having written it.

  • ...with a huge chip on his shoulder about how the system caters primarily to normies instead of specifically to him, thinks he has fat-no-matter-what genes and is really into rape play.

  • The old place on reddit has a tweet up by aella where she goes on a small evo-psych tirade about how since there's been an enormous amount of raid related kidnapping and rape in prehistory it stands to reason that women who enjoyed that sort of thing had an evolutionary advantage and so that's why most women today... eugh.

    I wonder where the superforecasters stand on aella being outed as a ghislain maxwell type fixer for the tescreal high priesthood.

  • There's also the communal living, the workplace polyamory along with the prominence of the consensual non-consensual kink, the tithing of the bulk of your earnings and the extreme goals-justify-the-means moralising, the emphasis on psychedelics and prescription amphetamines, and so on and so forth.

    Meaning, while calling them a cult incubator is actually really insightful and well put, I have a feeling that the closer you get to TESCREAL epicenters like the SFB the more explicitly culty things start to get.

  • EA started as an offshoot of LessWrong, and LW-style rationalism is still the main gateway into EA as it's pushed relentlessly in those circles, and EA contributes vast amounts of money back into LW goals. Air strikes against datacenters guy is basically bankrolled by Effective Altruism and is also the reason EA considers magic AIs (so called Artificial Super Intelligences) by far the most important risk to humanity's existence; they consider climate change mostly survivable and thus of far less importance, for instance.

    Needless to say, LLM peddlers loved that (when they aren't already LW/EAs or adjacent themselves, like the previous OpenAI administrative board before Altman and Microsoft took over). edit: also the founders of Anthropic.

    Basically you can't discuss one without referencing the other.

  • It's complicated.

    It's basically a forum created to venerate the works and ideas of that guy who in the first wave of LLM hype had an editorial published in TIME where he called for a worldwide moratorium on AI research and GPU sales to be enforced with unilateral airstrikes, and whose core audience got there by being groomed by one the most obnoxious Harry Potter fanfictions ever written, by said guy.

    Their function these days tends to be to provide an ideological backbone of bad scifi justifications to deregulation and the billionaire takeover of the state, which among other things has made them hugely influential in the AI space.

    They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.

    If this piques your interest check the links on the sidecard.

  • NASB does anybody else think the sudden influx of articles (from kurzgesagt to recent wapo) pushing the idea that you can't lose weight by exercise have anything to do with Ozempic being aggressively marketed at the same time?

  • And now they are sad and blame bsky for being toxic, on xitter, the chill and accepting app.

  • It's also the place where you go to to download models to use by yourself instead of sending all your data to the most unscrupulous people possible, so at least they've got that going for them.

  • 404 added an update that the dataset was removed:

    Update: Following the publication of this article on Tuesday evening, van Strien removed the dataset. "I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo," he wrote on Bluesky. "While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake."

  • The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji.

    HF is more of a platform for publishing this sort of thing, as well as the neural networks themselves and a specialized cloud service to train and deploy them, I think. They are not primarily a tool vendor, and they were around well before the LLM hype cycle.

  • Italy becomes Romania

    Not to mention that Romania (unrelated to the modern country) was an endonym for the Constantinople-led eastern roman empire, basically Greek for Roman-land.

    So yeah, the closer you look the wronger it gets.

  • Kind of interested in the precise type of brainworms that result in Greece annexing Northern Epirus from Albania but think Thrace should be its own thing.

  • The justice of the argument is clear to me. I have already made arrangements for my children to come to not be genetically mine. When the time comes, I will call upon their aid, presuming the sequencing does not tell us there are incompatibilities

    I like how that implies that he keeps a running genetic tally of all his acquaintances in case he needs to tap them for genetic material, which is not creepy at all.

    (Rorschach voice) Watched them today—parade their genetic blessings like medals earned in some cosmic lottery. Strong jawlines, symmetrical faces, eyes that catch the light just right. Retrieved 23AndMe card from alley behind 41st street. Admins restrained commenter screaming how it's all just eugenics. Is everyone but me going mad?

  • I like how he even had someone with art expertise literally explain it to him and he writes it off as “lol she must have super artist vision for details.”

    I'll quote her since it's by far the only worthwhile part of the article:

    When real pictures have details, the details have logic to them. I think of Ancient Gate being in the genre "superficially detailed, but all the details are bad and incoherent". The red and blue paint and blank stone feel like they're supposed to evoke worn-ness, but it's not clear what style this is supposed to be a worn-down version of. One gets the feeling that if all the paint were present it would look like a pile of shipping containers, if shipping containers were only made in two colors.

    It has ornaments, sort of, but they don't look like anything, or even a worn-down version of anything. There are matchy disks in the left, center, and right, except they're different sizes, different colors, and have neither "detail which parses as anything" nor stark smoothness. It has stuff that's vaguely evocative of Egyptian paintings if you didn't look carefully at all. The left column has a sort of door with a massive top-of-doorway-thingy over it. Why? Who knows? The right column doesn't, and you'd expect it to. Instead, the right column has 2.5 arches embossed into it that just kind of halfheartedly trail off.

    I'm not even sure how to describe the issues with the part a little above the door. It kind of sets a rhythm but then it gets distracted and breaks it. Are these semi-top protruding squares supposed to be red or blue? Ehh, whatever. Does the top border protrude the whole way? Ehh, mostly. Human artists have a secret technique, which is that if they don't know what all the details should be they get vague. And you can tell it's vague and you're not drawn to go "hmm, this looks interesting, oh wait it's terrible".

    I think part of the problem with AI art is that it produces stuff non-artists think look good but which on close inspection looks terrible, and so it ends up turning search results that used to be good into sifting through terrible stuff. Imagine if everyone got the ability to create mostly nutritional adequate meals for like five cents, but they all were mediocre rehydrated powder with way too much sucralose or artificial grape flavor or such. And your friends start inviting you over to dinner parties way more often because it's so easy to deal with food now, but practically every time, they serve you sucralose protein shake. (Maybe they do so because they were used to almost never eating food? This isn't a perfect analogy.) Furthermore, imagine people calling this the future of food and saying chefs are obsolete. You'd probably be like "wow, I'm happy that you have easy access to food you enjoy, and it is convenient for me to use sometimes, but this is kind of driving me crazy". I feel like this is relevant to artist derangement over AI art, though of course a lot of it is economic anxiety and I'm a hobbyist who doesn't feel like a temporarily embarrassed professional and thus can't relate.

    according to someone who goes by Ilzo on the socials.

    image in question: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GQ3wnEZWAAA_mY8?format=jpg

  • When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how there's currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.

    I suspect great overlap between the nothing-to-hide people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.

  • It might be just the all but placeholder characters that give it a b-movie vibe. I'd say it's a book that's both dumber and smarter that people give it credit for, but even the half-baked stuff gets you thinking. Especially the self-model stuff, and how problematic it can be to even discuss the concept in depth in languages that have the concept of a subject so deeply baked in.

    I thought that at worst one could bounce off to the actual relevant literature like Thomas Metzinger's pioneering, seminal and terribly written thesis, or Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

    Blindsight being referenced to justify LLM hype is news to me.

  • That's just googling with several wildly pointless extra steps of also googling.

  • That's a good way to put it. Another thing that was really en vogue at one point and might have been considered hard-ish scifi when it made it into Rifters was all the deep water telepathy via quantum brain tubules stuff, which now would only be taken seriously by wellness influencers.

    not a fan of trump for example

    In one the Eriophora stories (I think it's officially the sunflower circle) I think there's a throwaway mention about the Kochs having been lynched along with other billionaires on the early days of a mass mobilization to save what's savable in the face of environmental disaster (and also rapidly push to the stars because a Kardashev-2 civilization may have emerged in the vicinity so an escape route could become necessary in the next few millenia and this scifi story needs a premise).

  • Explaining in detail is kind of a huge end-of-book spoiler, but "All communication is manipulative" leaves out a lot of context and personally I wouldn't consider how it's handled a mark against Blindsight.